FORUM: Media need to respect privacy of public figures

Edward Wasserman

Published 12:00 am, Wednesday, February 27, 2013

MEDIA throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked. The words and images that were pilfered weren't all that interesting, so it wasn't a huge story.

But to me, a fan of the vanishing right to privacy, this was a reasonably big deal. I was struck by the way the former president's right to chat with intimates, free of eavesdroppers, was barely acknowledged.

Comments he had made privately and paintings he had kept from public view were exposed worldwide, as if the propriety of doing so was beyond question. I think that is worth looking at more carefully.

We'll leave to the FBI and Secret Service the question of whether the hacking warrants legal reprisal. My interest is in what sort of respect Bush's privacy deserves.

A Feb. 7 posting on The Smoking Gun, a website owned by Time-Warner that tilts toward tabloid journalism, first reported the hacking. The Smoking Gun handled the Bush material fairly well. It reported the hack "exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family" and noted it had obtained confidential material -- including home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses of Bush family members -- but didn't republish any of it.

In fact, most of the media I saw seemed aware the material was pretty personal. But they then turned around and squeezed every bit of even marginally interesting detail from it: family concern about the declining health of President George H.W. Bush; references to whether President Bill Clinton should deliver a eulogy; email from Fox News Channel's Britt Hume about the 2012 presidential election; images of W's artworks, which he plainly hadn't meant to exhibit publicly, let alone submit for artistic and psychological appraisal.

So what gives? The closest I found to an articulation of the principle underlying publication came from an old friend, Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post: "This is all private to the Bush family. There are no public policy implications here whatsoever."

That basic principle is a sound one: Before publishing private stuff, be convinced there's a valid and discernible connection with what's properly public.

To be sure, it may be impossible to know just how enlightening private utterances are and how reliably they illuminate public actions. But the principle is a sturdy one, well worth trying to apply. It means that certain things are off limits, unless shown otherwise. It means that Bush's email, if it existed, to a friend saying he didn't trust his vice president, Dick Cheney, wouldn't deserve the same privacy consideration as an email caution that Barbara Bush mustn't hear of discussions about how to handle her ailing husband's funeral -- which did exist and was mentioned in news accounts.)

And it means the media need to be careful about blithely assuming that when it comes to people of sufficient prominence, the claim to a personal sphere is nothing more than an impermissible wish for concealment.

Journalists for years have seized on the notion of "character," because it offers a noble-sounding way to justify an open season on the private lives of the powerful in the service of "the public's right to know."

Sometimes the inquiry is warranted. But more often, the claim that invasive reporting surfaces publicly significant realities is bogus. All that's happened is that the widening access to personal communications is used to shove into public gaze thoughts and experiences that have only a brittle claim to be any of our business.

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Before long, that looming danger of public exposure will circle back onto the private sphere, and stifle personal expression in ways that shrink, rather than widen, the richness of experience and thought that we feel free to share with those we trust.

Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. He wrote this column for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132.